To Test Listening Comprehension In A Communicative Way

Since Hymes first proposed the notion of"communicative competence"in 1972, the goal of language teaching has focused upon the building of the learners'communicative ability. The Communicative Approach is being adopted rapidly as a new and fresh idea, thus resulting in great changes related to the fields of syllabus design, material writing and teaching methodology. Similarly, the Communicative Approach has also been introduced into language testing, which causes the transfer of test focus from form and usage to meaning and use of languages. In testing, the theoretical model of communicative language abilities proposed by Bachman has gained wide popularity in recent years. Among the communicative language abilities, listening ability has been chosen to explore the theoretical considerations involved in the Communicative Approach to test language abilities. Listening is, by nature, an active process during which the listeners attain the goal of comprehension by complying both linguistic skills and non-linguistic skills. Although linguists classify the listening ability from different perspectives, they all regard listening ability as an integrative ability subsuming specific listening skills. On the basis of the clarified theoretical issues in communicative listening tasks, a sample English listening test oriented at Chinese college students has been tentatively designed and implemented. The analysis of the sample test and the comparison between the sample test and the listening sub-test of IELTS, a current authoritative communicative test, shows that the communicative testing of listening ability is feasible and desirable. The author also attempts to present the implication of the communicative testing to the classroom teaching of listening.